324 Literary and Philosophical Society. 



when a new generation had risen. The real inventor of 

 steamships, I have learned creditably elsewhere, the maker 

 and proprietor of that fruitless model on the Thames, was 

 Mr. Miller, Laird of Dalswinton, in Dumfriesshire (Poet 

 Burns' landlord), who spent his life and his estate in that 

 adventure, and is not now to be heard of in these parts, 

 having had to sell Dalswinton and die quasi-bankrupt (and 

 I should think broken-hearted) after the completing of his 

 painful invention and finding London and mankind dead 

 to it. Miller's assistant and work-hand for many years was 

 John Bell, a joiner in the neighbouring village of Thornhill. 

 Miller being ruined. Bell was out of work and connection, 

 emigrated to New York, and there speaking much of his 

 old master and glorious unheeded invention well known to 

 Bell in all its outlines or details, at length found one Fulton 

 to listen to him ; and by Fulton and Bell (about 1809) ^^ 

 actual packet steamer was got launched, and, lucratively 

 plying on the Hudson River, became the miracle of Yan- 

 keedom and gradually of all lands. These I believe are 

 essentially the facts. Old Robert McQueen, of Thornhill, 

 Strachey of the India House, and many other bits of good 

 testimony and indication, once far apart, curiously coales- 

 cing and corresponding for me. And as, possibly enough, 

 the story is not now known in whole to anybody but myself, 

 it may go in here as a digression, ct propos of those brisk 

 little Greenock steamers which I first saw and still so 

 vividly remember ; little " Defiance," &c., saucily bounding 

 about with their red sails m the sun on this my tour with 

 Irving.' 



it might be also said that it is unfair to mention these 

 men without also mentioning that remarkable inventor 

 Denis Papin, v/hose little vessel with paddles, not steam 



